The third neighbour visits.
He came yesterday, a certain George W. Bush.
I was eating mutton shank soup, surprise surprise, when I saw him on television. I swapped to a seat more square to the broadcast. He walked beside Mongolia's Prime Minister - proprietor of a name I won't embarrass myself by trying to spell - rugged up in the requisite attire and that tight, smug, armed facial expression so many have come to distrust. Broadcast live from Sukhbaatar Square, where usually schoolkids on excursion mill around Sukhbaatar's statue like white around the yolk, teachers infusing their curious minds with a firm sense of history- but not today. The Square was cordoned off and guarded meticulously for George's arrival. They say this is the Old Mongolia making way for the New. I wonder if the kids knew what was going on, the identity of this stallion galloping from plains afar, the undressed intent of his visit? I wonder what their teachers told them?
Met up with Muugi and caught the trolley-car Squarewards. We wanted to participate in whatever this was. The trolley-car broke down half-way, portentously. We started running but Muugi fell. We walked the rest of the way, breath like cigarette smoke.
The Square: impenetrable. We inferred George'd leave for the airport soon enough, so manned the only road accessing the airport. Others shared the thought, lining the four-laned strip with hawkish eyes, anticipatory, hands in pockets. We added density to the crowd, waited. Boiled mutton permeated the air. A drunk couple stumbled out of a pub and began fighting. We waited, the sun retreating behind the clouds, the temperature nipping our innards, challenging all to stay. No-one left. It was the rare allure of capturing a glimpse of a figure whose every decision affects, shapes, dictates history, and the future, our future. Plus there were schools of Western news crews there, armed with shoulder-crushing cameras and pinecone microphones and a noticable lack of consideration for the sidewalks of Ulaanbaatar- and to be on television is a very cool and desirable and prideworthy thing, a notch on the belt is it not? Some people were there for that maybe. Police drove robust-looking four-wheel-drives along the strip at a miserable walking pace, blaring overly aggressive directives at the crowds through a loudspeaker, which were plainly ignored. We are the people! But in an instant the mobile police dotting the kerb every five metres received calls on their hip-radios, static buzzing febrishly, then ushered us back, beyond the footpath. Back, beyond the fence. Back, beyond the 24-hour banks and ger-apparel stores. So far back we had only tiny teasing vistas through which to view the man of the hour, hundreds off us pushing and shoving with pointed elbows and knees like hooligans furoring at a match.
And all this for a glimpse of George. A glimpse of George in a moving car.
Sirens and tension. A shiny black car. Two then five then a lull. Suddenly a limo - George! The crowd stirs, curious. Muugi boos and hisses. She makes a gun out of her hands and shoots George between the eyes. She is not covert about it. A policeman sees and his eyes read vengeance. But he is stationed in that spot, five metres from the policeman stationed at the next spot, and is his indignation is a tethered entity, something he cannot purge on a trigger-happy Muugi. She reloads her hand-pistol and draws it in the direction of the policeman. I beam. She does not show mercy, this Mongolian rogue, and fires with a bang and cackle. Muugi is the future of Mongolia, not Bush.
Meanwhile, shrill cries from across the road. A throng of caucasians, three with the American flag draped around their necks, holler their adulation for dearest George, whom must turn a bashful pink in response. The severity of their clamour is sect-like, scientologistish, like perhaps they've seen God, or Elvis, perhaps even Chinggis himself. I squint and see they span the gamut of ages - it is a family. Monday 21st November and I hope they haven't stolen a day off work and school to scream shamelessly for ten seconds as Georgeboy speeds by, left to right, wispy as a shooting star. And I even more earnestly hope they haven't arranged a trip to Mongolia, as a family, centred around a four-hour-in-total visit by one George W. Bush. This family was the most disturbing thing I have seen in a long and merciful time.
They finally shut the hell up.
It was all over, quick like a bee sting. I didn't see him, nor even his silhouette, so dark and private were the limo's windows.
An old couple were the first to cross the road that' d been forcefully vacant for so long. Her face so wrinkled it was hard to pinpoint her eyes. His back hunched and skin so caked with dirt he seemed Middle-Eastern. They both wore old dels, matching, on their backs threadbare sacks bursting with uniformly bundled fagots. They were bracing for the night's upcoming frost. They reached the middle of the road and stopped, gazed around, incredulous. The police, the fanfare, the barren bitumen of the road before them. They looked at one another with raised eyebrows and - I know this - thought: What's the fuss? Why the hubbub? These people are so queer. This world is so crazy.
They scurried along, oblivious and unaffected and true in every sense of the word.
The day was over. Bush had come and gone.
Addendum: One of the Peace Corpers, my favourite one as it turns out, received an invite to Bush's 13-minute speech yesterday in Government House. She apprised me last night on a bottom bunk that "it was basically 13 minutes of more babbly bullshit about Iraq. These poor, poor Mongolians."
* So check out these somewhat professional blogs if you crave a recount of Bush's visit from this side of the equator, which you ought to, because they're interesting:
http://www.mongolianmatters.com/
posted by Simply Mark @ 1:37 pm
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